China’s lone Nobel Peace Prize laureate, the political dissident Liu
Xiaobo, is gravely ill. In 2008, Liu, a prolific essayist and poet, was
working on a manifesto advocating peaceful democratic reform, which
became known as Charter 08, when the Chinese government tried him and
found him guilty of “inciting subversion of state power.” Since then, he
has been serving an eleven-year sentence at a prison in the remote
northeastern province of Liaoning, and his wife, Liu Xia, has been under
house arrest in Beijing, despite the lack of any charges against her.
Liu’s diagnosis of late-stage liver cancer came at the end of last
month. The prognosis is grim. In a video that a friend of the couple’s
shared on social media, Liu’s wife says, through tears, that the doctors
“can’t do surgery, can’t do radiation therapy, can’t do chemotherapy.”

Yet even this particularly wretched twist of fate has not liberated the
man who has devoted his life to fighting for liberty. Although Liu, who
is now sixty-one, has been transferred to a hospital in Shenyang, on
medical parole, he has yet to be granted release from his sentence. Last
Thursday, his lawyer said that the authorities are refusing to allow him
to travel abroad for medical treatment. In response to a statement from
the United States Embassy calling for the couple to be given “genuine
freedom,” the Chinese foreign ministry warned that “no country has a
right to interfere and make irresponsible remarks on Chinese internal
affairs.” It added that “China is a country with rule of law, where
everybody is equal in front of the law.”

This is a curious remark, given the increasingly repressive regime that
the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, has fostered since taking office, in
2013. Civil society and the rule of law were part of what Liu campaigned
for more than a decade ago, but, as unlikely as those concepts seemed
then, they are less certain now. After a period of enforced ideological
conformity, the government has expanded its security apparatus,
increased censorship, tightened its control of nongovernmental
organizations, and toughened surveillance laws. Rights lawyers and
activists have been arrested and jailed, and others have fled abroad.

Liu once had opportunities to do so himself. A scholar of Chinese
literature and philosophy, he taught at Beijing Normal University in the
nineteen-eighties, where he became known for his frank reappraisals of
China’s past and present, particularly of the brutalities imposed during
the decades under Mao. Liu’s passion and audacity could at times be
provoking to both his peers and to the public, but they spoke to a deep
investment in his country’s future and his determination to contribute
to it.

His intellectual honesty rendered him vulnerable yet dauntless. In the
spring of 1989, Liu was in New York, where he was teaching at Barnard
College, when the student protests calling for democracy and
accountability began in Tiananmen Square. He returned to Beijing and
stayed in the square for several days, talking to the students about how
democratic politics must be “politics without hatred and without
enemies.” When Premier Li Peng imposed martial law, Liu negotiated with
the Army to allow demonstrators a safe exit from Tiananmen. But, at the
beginning of June, the Party ordered a crackdown, in which hundreds of
people were killed. (The state has never permitted an official tally.)
For Liu’s involvement in the events, the Chinese press labelled him a
“mad dog” and a “Black Hand” for allegedly manipulating the will of the
people, and he was sentenced to two years in prison for
“counter-revolutionary propaganda.”

After his release, Liu was offered asylum in the Australian Embassy, but
he refused it. Similar offers came again and again, but a life in which
Liu did not feel that he could make a direct impact held no appeal for
him. At a time when other intellectuals, registering the need for
self-preservation, turned to writing books less likely to be banned on
the mainland, Liu chose to prioritize his principles, in order to be an
“authentic” person. He was barred from publishing and giving public
lectures in China, but on foreign Web sites he wrote more than a
thousand articles promoting humanitarianism and democracy; he called the
Internet “God’s gift to China.” Liu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize,
in 2010, while he was serving his sentence, in recognition of “his long
and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China.”

In an essay titled “Changing the Regime by Changing Society”—which
during his trial was cited as evidence of his counter-revolutionary
ideals—Liu expressed hope that the Chinese people would awaken to their
situation and that their new awareness would forge a sense of solidarity
against the state. But he also warned of a growing moral vacuum in the
nation. He wrote:

China has entered an Age of Cynicism in which people no longer believe
in anything. . . . Even high officials and other Communist Party
members no longer believe Party verbiage. Fidelity to cherished
beliefs has been replaced by loyalty to anything that brings material
benefit. Unrelenting inculcation of Chinese Communist Party ideology
has . . . produced generations of people whose memories are blank.

It’s impossible to say what access Liu has had to the outside world
during his incarceration. It would certainly pain him to see how little
younger people in China care or even know about the events in Tiananmen
(the subject is strictly censored in the media) and how the nation’s
growing international prominence has obscured its domestic ills—though
he predicted as much. “The Chinese Communists are concentrating on
economics, seeking to make themselves part of globalization, and are
courting friends internationally precisely by discarding their erstwhile
ideology,” he wrote in 2006. “When the ‘rise’ of a large dictatorial
state that commands rapidly increasing economic strength meets with no
effective deterrence from outside, but only an attitude of appeasement
from the international mainstream, the results will not only be another
catastrophe for the Chinese people, but likely also a disaster for the
spread of liberal democracy in the world.” It perhaps would not surprise
him to hear that last week, austerity-stricken Greece, which is courting
Chinese investment, blocked a European Union effort to issue a statement
condemning China’s human-rights violations.

As the news of Liu’s illness spread surreptitiously throughout China,
democracy activists started a petition far narrower in its ambitions
than Charter 08. It asks only for Liu to be freed and to be given
whatever medical care might help him now. He would surely be grateful to
his supporters for that gesture, but more than his illness he would
regret how correctly he diagnosed Beijing’s recurring authoritarian
impulses and his countrymen’s growing indifference to them. Liu has
always been a man of ideas, but that prescience will be of no comfort to
anyone.

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About Me

ROLAND SAN JUAN was a researcher, management consultant, inventor, a part time radio broadcaster and a publishing director. He died last November 25, 2008 after suffering a stroke. His staff will continue his unfinished work to inform the world of the untold truths. Please read Erick San Juan's articles at: ericksanjuan.blogspot.com This blog is dedicated to the late Max Soliven, a FILIPINO PATRIOT.
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